


Work

by bakedgoldfish



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-02-22
Updated: 2003-02-22
Packaged: 2019-05-15 04:51:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14783895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bakedgoldfish/pseuds/bakedgoldfish
Summary: "So I work."





	Work

**Author's Note:**

> A copy of this work was once archived at National Library, a part of the [ West Wing Fanfiction Central](https://fanlore.org/wiki/West_Wing_Fanfiction_Central), a West Wing fanfiction archive. More information about the Open Doors approved archive move can be found in the [announcement post](http://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/8325).

**Work**

**by:** Baked Goldfish 

**Category:** Leo fic, first-person POV  
**Rating:** TEEN  
**Summary:** "So I work."  
**Spoilers:** maybe a teeny one for War Crimes  
**Disclaimer:** Poor college student.  Owns nothing here.  Don't sue.  


A lot of people wonder why I work so damn much. 

It's a busy job, you could say.  I come in before everyone else every day and leave after everyone else every night.  I keep busy, because I'm the White House Chief of Staff.  You could say it's a busy job. 

But a lot of people seem to think I work more than my predecessors did.  A lot of people wonder why I work so much. 

When I was younger, after my father died, I was expected to take over some of his duties.  It was the late nineteen-fifties, boys were expected to be men in the absence of their fathers, and I saw nothing wrong with that.  It was what needed to be done, since my mother couldn't really get a job that would support my sisters and me.  So, after school every day, I went downtown to the law office run by a family friend, and I did some basic secretarial type work.  It was only minimum wage, but I learned a lot about the law there.  For two years, during high school, that's what I did. 

When I got into college, I did the whole ROTC thing – it paid the bills, and my father and his father before him were both in the military.  I knew when I got out I'd have to go active for a few years, and I didn't want to get a billet as some sort of administrator or anything.  So, between classes, I'd go down to a local airfield, got a job, and learned everything I could about airplanes.  I still don't know how I managed that, classes, ROTC activities, and dating Jenny, all at the same time. 

The long and short of it is, from the time I was sixteen on, I never slowed down.  I was always doing something – studying, working, training, whatever.  I was always doing something.  When I got in country, still early in the war, I was posted to the Korat airbase in Thailand.  Man, I don't think I had more than three, four hours of sleep on any given day there.  If I wasn't flying, I was doing maintenance.  If I wasn't doing maintenance, I was doing paperwork.  And if I wasn't doing any of that, I was doing things basic to survival – eating, sleeping, writing home. 

Then came December 1967.  Now Thailand's got three seasons, hot, cool, and wet.  In December, it's cool.  I was on a Pack 6 night run, up to a location near Hanoi.  I got shot down.  It happened to a lot of guys there.  And, I got captured.  I was deep in North Vietnam, I pretty much knew it was gonna happen as soon as I ejected.  

But, you know, even in that camp, I was working for a couple years.  Everyone there had things to do.  We were in a prison camp, but don't think we weren't doing things; we were resisting.  The Code of Conduct says POWs have to resist by all means available, and attempt escape wherever possible.  You didn't escape the Hanoi Hilton.  Some guys tried, but nobody really ever did.  So, instead, we resisted against them.  We were busy coming up with new ways to evade their efforts to get information out of us, and we were busy just surviving. 

The physical brutality, I could take; we all could.  After a while, you pass out, and when you come to, sometimes you pass out again.  And it was just physical; you can learn to block it out, and you can learn to lose yourself temporarily.  Also, it was all for a specific reason: nothing the North Vietnamese were doing conformed to the Geneva Convention.  "Humane" just didn't seem to be a word in their vocabulary.  This may sound funny, but we were trying to get our captors in line, and it worked, too; by 1969, their attempts to question were only half-hearted.  We had a job to do back then, when we were in those rooms evading their questions.  So that wasn't really the worst part. 

The worst part, really, were those moments between everything, when you just sat around doing nothing.  Especially if you were alone.  There was just silence, and inactivity.  Just hours of quiet, and all you could do was sit on the straw mat that was supposed to be your bed, and think.  There were days where I would lay there, hear only the sound of my own breathing, and wonder if this was what it's like to be dead.  If not for the knowledge that other guys were going through the same thing, it would've driven me insane.  After nine, ten years of almost non-stop activity, I couldn't adjust to it.  It was like being tied up, blindfolded, gagged, and tossed into the deep end of the pool.  I didn't know how to handle those dark, claustrophobic, lonely hours. 

I still don't know.  So I work. 

-end- 


End file.
